How to use Feedburner with your Ghost blog

The following guide outlines how to integrate email subscriptions with your Ghost blog using Feedburner, a is a free service that pushes your blog content to readers who subscribe.

Note: This tutorial assumes that you already have access to an HTML editor capable of recognizing “.hbs” files. If you do not have an HTML editor, there are several free options, such as Brackets.

Setup Feedburner with your Ghost blog

Every Ghost blog has it’s own RSS feed. Your blog’s RSS feed is located atyour-ghost-blog.com/rss. To begin, go to Feedburner and log into your Google account if you aren’t already signed into one. If you do not have a Google account, you can always create one for free. Once logged in, Feedburner will prompt you to enter your blog’s RSS feed URL (i.e. http://your-blog.com/rss).

The next screen will prompt you to enter in a title for your feed as well as allow you to customise the feedburner link.

When you’ve finished, click “Next” to continue.

Once your title has been set, the next screen will prompt you to either click “Next” to add additional Feedburner stats to your “feed” or skip ahead to manage your feed. For the purpose of this tutorial, select “Skip directly to feed management” to continue.

Access the “Publicize” settings

Once on the main feed management screen, click on the “Publicize” tab from the top of your screen.

Click on “Email Subscriptions” from the “Services” menu

Next, click “Email Subscriptions” from the left side navigation menu to access your email subscription settings.

Activate the email subscription service

Once you’ve reached the email subscription section, you will need to activate the service. To do this, simply click on the “Activate” button.

Add an email subscription form to your theme

Once email subscriptions have been activated, Feedburner will provide a snippet of form code. You will need to copy this code to your clipboard, so that you can add it to your theme files.

You can place the form snippet anywhere you’d like the subscription form to appear on your theme, however if you’d like the form to appear on every page/post of your blog, the default.hbs file may be an ideal location. Regardless of where you place it, you will need to open the file in an HTML editor, and paste the form code into the file where you’d like the form to display.

You can modify all aspects of the form (i.e. remove or change the style), so long as you retain the form’s action, method, target, onsubmit, and the type="hidden"elements.

Link directly to a signup page
If you’d prefer to link visitors directly to your email subscription signup page when they click on the “Subscribe” button, rather than include a form, you will need to copy the subscription link that appears just below the form code snippet.

Next, you will need to open up your theme files, and replace all links within your theme that reference your RSS URL, {{@blog.url}}/rss/, with your new Feedburner subscription link. In the default Casper theme, you will need to update the navigation.hbs file (found in the partials directory).

Note:If you want to retain the custom RSS feeds for each tag, you will need to create separate feedburner feeds for each tag, using the tag’s specific RSS feed – i.e {{@blog.url}}/tag/{{tag.slug}}/rss/.

When you’ve finished editing your theme, save the file(s) and upload your theme to your blog. When finished, your visitors will be able to subscribe to your blog using their email address, and you will be able to manage and see how many people have subscribed to your blog via Feedburner.

Other RSS to Email Solutions

If you’d prefer to use a different service to push content notifications to subscribers, you can always integrate a subscription form using MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, both of which have an RSS to email service that can work directly with your blog’s RSS feed.